BIOLOGY, PARENTS, AND MARRIAGE 101: Elizabeth Marquardt replies to Mike Pignatello...

...at MarriageMovement.org. Some excerpts:

...Of course, if same sex couples want to have a baby of "their own," they have to borrow or buy sperms, eggs, and/or a womb, in other words, use what I call radical reproductive technologies. I am troubled by straight and gay parents doing this, for the reasons I've already stated: children tell us that growing up with little or no relationship with a biological parent opens up a tremendous set of questions in the development of their own identity. Should their complicated identity development alone persuade us to make all of this illegal? Maybe not. But should we ignore what they say, insist they're fine, and feel good about ourselves for supporting adults' rights to happiness? I have serious problems with that.

Pignatello then conflates adoption with every other alternative family form, but it's clearly not the same thing. Adoption is a special case when children's own biological parents prove unfit and society places them with other parents for their own best interests. Adoption is child-centered, not adult-centered. I personally feel that it's fine for same sex couples to adopt, and I especially admire and feel humbled by gay and straight couples who adopt special-needs children.

The problem is that changing the definition of marriage, as the Mass. court did, to make marriage gender-neutral implicitly supports gay couples using radical reproductive technologies to form their families, and thus creates a socially-approved new alternative family form that is dependent on this technology to have their "own" children, something we have never seen before. The Mass court now affirms that children only need "parents," but not a mother and father, so by the court's logic there is no moral argument against children being created intentionally fatherless or motherless. ...

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posted by Eve at 9:09 AM | link

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